frantically attempting to peg into the holes of the primitive
switchboard and so establish "connections." When not knocking
down and fighting each other, these boys were swearing into
transmitters at the customers; and it is said that the incurable
profanity of these early "telephone boys" had much to do with
their supersession by girls. In the early days of the telephone,
each instrument had to carry its own battery, usually installed
in a little box under the transmitter. The early telephone wires,
even in the largest cities, were strung on poles, as they are in
country and suburban districts today. In places like New York and
Chicago, these thousands of overhanging wires not only destroyed
the attractiveness of the thoroughfare, but constantly interfered
with the fire department and proved to be public nuisances in
other ways. A telephone wire, however, loses much of its
transmitting power when placed under ground, and it took many
years of experimenting before the engineers perfected these
subways. In these early days, of course, the telephone was purely
a local matter. Certain visionary enthusiasts had foreseen the
possibility of a national, long distance system, but a large
amount of labor, both in the laboratory and out, was to be
expended before these aspirations could become realities.

The transformation of this rudimentary means of communication
into the beautiful mechanism which we have today forms a splendid
chapter in the history of American invention. Of all the details
in Bell's apparatus the receiver is almost the only one that
remains now what it was forty years ago. The story of the
transmitter in itself would fill a volume. Edison's success in
devising a transmitter which permitted talk in ordinary
conversational tones--an invention that became the property of